Central Florida's Independent Jewish Voice
Central Florida's Independent Jewish Voice
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NEW YORK (JTA)-Jerry Silverman recently started his second five-year term as the CEO of the Jewish Federations of North America-the first time that any chief of the federation umbrella organization has been signed to a second term. With the federations' annual General Assembly nearing-it's slated for Nov. 9-11 in National Harbor, Md., just outside of Washington-JTA thought it would be a good time to check in and see how the priority areas that Silverman identified last year have fared. He...
NEW YORK (JTA) – President Obama devoted the bulk of his U.N. speech to the fight against violent Islamic extremism and hardly mentioned Iran's nuclear program. In his address last year to the General Assembly, Obama spent a great deal of time talking about Tehran's nuclear pursuit, describing it as one of two major focus areas for American diplomatic efforts (the other was the Israeli-Palestinian conflict). On Wednesday, he devoted just four lines to Iran. "America is pursuing a diplomatic reso...
NEW YORK (JTA)-The circus is coming to town. No, there won't be marching elephants, lion tamers or motorcycles jumping through rings of fire. But there may be wolves in sheep's clothing, tightrope walking and motorcades blocking traffic. We're talking, of course, about the United Nations General Assembly, held every September at U.N. headquarters in midtown Manhattan. It's an opportunity for presidents and prime ministers to fly into the Big Apple, get their 15 minutes in front of a global...
(JTA) – All is not well in the U.S.-Israel relationship. Somehow, the 50 days of fighting between Israel and Hamas frayed ties between Washington and Jerusalem. How did this happen? In part, the contretemps stems from the divergent ways that the Israeli and U.S. administrations view the Gaza war. Here's where each side is coming from: In the eyes of the U.S. administration... While Israel's security concerns vis-a-vis Gaza are legitimate, the ferocity of Israel's response against Hamas in G...
MONTICELLO, N.Y. (JTA)-The moment I kicked in the door of the abandoned house in the heart of the Catskills, I felt like I was in an episode of "The Twilight Zone: Borscht Belt edition." In some corners it appeared as if the residents were just out for the afternoon. Pictures and tchotchkes adorned the walls. A mezuzah with the parchment still inside was affixed to a doorpost. A working upright piano sat in one corner. Ironing boards were open. Mattresses lay on beds; in one room the beds were s...
(JTA)-Until this latest war, if you asked most Israelis about the threat from Gaza, they would probably start talking about Hamas rockets. But that has changed over the last few days of fighting, for two reasons. One, the much-heralded success of the Iron Dome missile defense system has all but neutralized Hamas' rocket threat. Two, and far more troubling for Israelis, they have woken up to the true extent of the subterranean threat from Gaza: the tunnels that snake underneath the densely...
(JTA)- Israel and Hamas are fighting their third major conflict in six years, and while some things have stayed the same, the battle lines have also shifted in a few notable ways. Here are eight things you need to know about the current conflagration: • Iron Dome has been a game changer: The U.S.-funded Israeli anti-missile system was operational during the last conflagration in November 2012, but its remarkable success rate this go-around has reduced Gaza's missiles to more of an irritant t...
NEW YORK (JTA) - What does a fervent religious movement do after the death of its singular leader? That was the existential question the Chabad-Lubavitch movement faced 20 years ago this week when its charismatic rebbe, Menachem Mendel Schneerson, died with no heir. Amid the grief and turbulence following his 1994 death, many believed Chabad would be torn apart by those who believed it should proclaim its departed rebbe as the messiah and those who didn't, or that the messianists would doom the...
NEW YORK (JTA) – The Reform movement posted a prayer. Chabad asked followers to pledge to do a mitzvah. The Jewish Federations of North America set up a Web page to express solidarity. The disappearance of three Israeli teens in Judea and Samaria last week is being taken as a call to action uniting many disparate elements of the American Jewish community. At synagogues across America spanning the major denominations, Jews recited psalms or offered special prayers for the safe return of the t...
NEW YORK (JTA) - A special panel tasked with examining the governance and strategic vision of the Claims Conference is recommending that the organization shift its long-term focus to Holocaust education and remembrance, JTA has learned. The panel was appointed last year following a scandal involving the Claims Conference's failure to detect a $57 million fraud scheme there that persisted until 2009. It also recommended cutting in half the size of the board's executive committee and the number...
WILKES-BARRE, Pa. (JTA)-The Bais Menachem Youth Development program in this northeastern Pennsylvania city is no typical Chabad yeshiva. The students wear flip-flops and T-shirts, not the typical black-and-white of Hasidic seminaries. In addition to Jewish law and Bible study, the curriculum includes improv nights, poetry slams and screenings of National Geographic nature shows. The students take taekwondo classes, skiing lessons and canoe trips down the Delaware River. There's even a house...
NEW YORK (JTA)-A lot of people around the world hate the Jews. That's the main finding of the Anti-Defamation League's largest-ever worldwide survey of anti-Semitic attitudes. The survey, released Tuesday, found that 26 percent of those polled-representing approximately 1.1 billion adults worldwide-harbor deeply anti-Semitic views. More than 53,000 people were surveyed in 102 countries and territories covering approximately 86 percent of the world's population. "Our findings are sobering but,...
NEW YORK (JTA) — Who knew? It turns out that mohels not only have one of the most peculiar professions in the Jewish world, but they’re funny, eccentric and self-promotional in odd ways, too. Circumcision activists pro and con can debate the efficacy of circumcision for everything from health benefits to sexual pleasure to religious mores, but I decided to go a different route with a quest to find America’s Top Mohels. How did I choose the eight featured here? I did not inspect thousands of instances of their workmanship. I did not rate them...
(JTA)-Longtime fans of the Chicago Cubs know there are a few mainstays they can expect when they visit Wrigley Field: ivy on the outfield walls, a strict no-wave policy rigorously enforced by fans and, most days, disappointing play by the hometown team. But there's one little-known quirk at Wrigley that appears to be fading away as the ballpark, which celebrated its 100th anniversary last week, enters its second century: the numerous Orthodox Jewish vendors who sell food and drinks in the...
NEW YORK (JTA)—When a 2009 Holocaust-era assets conference concluded with a landmark statement of principles on Holocaust restitution, many restitution advocates had high hopes that a corner had been turned in the struggle for survivor justice. The Terezin Declaration, which had the support of 46 countries participating in the conference in the Czech Republic, outlined a set of goals for property restitution. It recognized the advancing age of Holocaust survivors and the imperative of delivering them aid and justice in their final years. ...
BOCA RATON, Fla. (JTA)-Stroll past the kosher section of most large supermarkets in America and you could be forgiven for thinking that Jewish diets consist mainly of jarred gefilte fish, unsalted matzahs and Tam-Tam crackers. Not so at the Winn-Dixie supermarket in this affluent South Florida suburb. There's a kosher bakery with fresh pizza and dairy and pareve desserts; a meat and deli counter with hot foods like chicken wings, potato kugel and meatballs; a refrigerated case with cold salads;...
(JTA)- They left after Venezuelan secret police raided a Jewish club in 2007, and after the local synagogue was ransacked by unidentified thugs two years later. They left after President Hugo Chavez expelled Israel's ambassador to Caracas, and when he called on Venezuela's Jews to condemn Israel for its actions in Gaza in 2009. They left when Caracas claimed the ignoble title of most dangerous city in the world-and when inflation hit double digits, food shortages took hold and the country's murd...
NEW YORK (JTA)-Just how open should Jewish institutions be when it comes to talking about Israel? That's the question at the center of a flurry of controversies over the last few days involving Jewish museums, an Orthodox high school and Hillel chapters on college campuses. For years, Jewish institutions have been grappling with where to draw red lines when it comes to criticism of Israel. Should they open their doors to groups like Jewish Voice for Peace, which is allied with the BDS movement...
NEW YORK (JTA) – When a 16-year-old Lubavitcher named Ari Halberstam was gunned down on the Brooklyn Bridge on March 1, 1994 by a Lebanese livery cab driver, the killing seemed to be a cut-and-dried case. The shooter, Rashid Baz, was captured the following day and confessed to police. After a trial several months later, he was sentenced to 141 years in prison. But a murder conviction was not enough for Ari's mother, Devorah Halberstam. She saw a terrorist conspiracy behind the shooting and c...
HOLLYWOOD, Fla. (JTA)-At the Urban Rustic Cafe in a strip mall in this city located between Miami to the south and the Palm Beach retirement communities to the north, the line for a table stretches out the door and into the parking lot. Inside the kosher establishment, the volume is loud. An elderly Orthodox man sitting near the window leans across a table to hear what his wife is saying. At the dessert counter, a gaggle of boys with tzitzis fringes hanging from their shirts have their noses...
NEW YORK (JTA)—When I first heard about Ariel Sharon’s stroke—the first one, a minor brain attack about four weeks before he suffered the massive hemorrhage that would leave him comatose for the final eight years of his life—I was having dinner at a Jerusalem restaurant with a colleague from The Jerusalem Post. We both sat transfixed as we watched the TV over the bar. It was December 2005, just five months after Sharon had completed Israel’s withdrawal from the Gaza Strip, and there was a sense that Sharon was in the midst of engineeri...
NEW YORK (JTA)-Mark Bittman is not a religious man by any stretch of the imagination, least of all his own. A longtime food writer for The New York Times who three years ago shifted from cooking to food policy columnist, Bittman has made a living eating the kinds of things frowned upon by Jewish tradition. As he told me recently, "Pork cooked in milk is an amazing dish." Though he was born and raised a Jew-going to synagogue, religious school and Reform youth groups at Manhattan's East End...
SAN DIEGO (JTA)-What do you get when you bring together 5,000 of the Reform movement's faithful for a conference in sunny San Diego in mid-December? Four days of singing, learning, schmoozing and worrying at a gathering that seemed equal parts pep rally and intervention session. For pep, there were the spirited prayer services, the morning-till-night stream of musical performances and Rabbi Rick Jacobs, the president of the Union for Reform Judaism, or URJ, who compared the challenges facing...
NEW YORK (JTA)-To an outsider, the battles might seem to be over trifles-in some cases, just a few feet. Where may a non-Jewish parent stand in the synagogue during his child's bar mitzvah? Can a non-Jew open the holy ark? Should non-Jewish synagogue members have voting rights? Such questions have been pushed to the fore by the growing percentage of Conservative homes that include non-Jewish family members-more than one-quarter of them, according to the recent Pew Research Center survey. For...
(JTA)- Marla Topp of Temple Judea Mizpah in Skokie, Ill., doesn't need survey data to tell her that Reform Judaism is in decline and Orthodox Judaism is growing. She has to look no further than her own synagogue. A couple of months ago, the temple began renting out unused classroom space to an Orthodox school that had outgrown its building. Now its classrooms serve as a satellite location for the Arie Crown Hebrew Day School's early childhood program. The Orthodox preschool isn't the temple's...
